pavement ants hoist
by Douglas J. Lanzo
bacon bits and sauerkraut
along sidewalk cracks
as we savor hot dogs
overloaded with flavor
Pavement ants are perhaps the most successfully adapted animal species of modern times to New York City. As the most populous ant species, they outnumber humans in the Big Apple by the ratio of 2,000:1, representing over 50% of the billion plus ants in each of its 5 boroughs. Just how these aptly named insects thrive through all seasons in NYC is a marvel to behold.
Enamored of greasy foods like hotdogs, pavement ants send scouts out on initially randomized foraging walks to cover as much territory as possible. With extremely sensitive olfactory receptors on their antennae, they can detect the fat and protein molecules in a hot dog in concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion. Following windblown hotdog odor plumes, these ants follow “scent gradients”, tracking rising concentrations of scent until they locate the food source.
If you’ve ever been to Manhattan and grabbed a hotdog, chili dog or street taco, you’ll readily appreciate how easy it is for a portion of these overloaded toppings to end up “fragrancing” the city’s streets. Not only are pavement ants masters of locating NYC’s offloaded fast food treats, they are masters at breaking them down into pieces and hoisting them on their waterproof, triple-segmented exoskeleton, weathering wind and rain, back to their queen and larvae for high-energy feeding. Foraging in groups of hundreds, the scouts leave a trail of pheromones for their worker ants to follow. Once at the hot dog, worker ants sample the food to determine its quality, and if satisfactory, break it down with their mandibles, digest some of it in their social stomachs and carry the remainder in bits back to their nests, cleverly utilizing sidewalk cracks to avoid being stomped in the process.
Further reading:
To learn more about these remarkably successful fast-food scavengers, and entrancing behavior, check out Episode 2: Food of BBC Earth’s series: New York: America’s Busiest City (2016) or the “60,000 Hot Dogs” Research published Dr. Elsa Youngsteadt, in Global Change Biology (2014), calculating that Manhattan’s arthropods could consume the equivalent of 60,000 hot dogs annually in the Broadway and West Street corridor alone.
Author bio:
Doug is an award-winning American author and poet of over 560 internationally published poems whose debut novel The Year of the Bear won the Ames Award for YA Books and whose second book I Have Lived was named American Book Fest Novella of the Year. His Author’s website is www.douglaslanzo.com.